Eyal Amir, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UIUC
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Eyal Amir is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Prior to joining UIUC, he held a Post- doctoral researcher position with Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley (2001-2003). He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 1992 and 1994, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002. Professor Amir's research addresses knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning mechanisms for modeling and controlling static and dynamic systems. He is interested in autonomous systems that learn and make use of explicit knowledge to act in large, complex, partially observed worlds. Most related to the current proposal is his work on reasoning about the actions of agents in partially observable domains (e.g., answering questions about "who did what?"). Also relevant is his work on sequential detection of change (e.g., deciding on positions and activity of sensors to detect security breaches). In the past decade he has worked on logical modeling and automated reasoning, probabilistic modeling and reasoning with first-order probabilistic knowledge, planning, robot control, autonomous agent architectures, and graph algorithms. His work combines theory and applications. Professor Amir was chosen recently as one of the top young artificial intelligence researchers by IEEE Intelligent Systems. He will be featured in an upcoming article called “AI Ten to Watch.� He also won the NSF CAREER Award in 2006, and received the Arthur L. Samuel Award for best Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at Stanford University 2001-2002. Professor Amir is a program co-chair of Commonsense 2007 (international symposium on formalization of commonsense reasoning), on the program committee of virtually all premier AI conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, ICML, ECAI, KR, and others) and a reviewer of books and journal articles for Cambridge University Press, Morgan Kauffman Publishers, Communications of the ACM, AI Journal, Journal of AI Research, AI Communications, and others.
